Le mie vacanze

Last summer I had one of the best vacation of my last 10-15 years. I have been living in the US since 1990, and every time that I had an opportunity I had been going back to Italy. Every time I flight back to Florence, to visit my family and my friends. Most of the time I go back with my family, and I don't have a lot of time to spend visiting or traveling to other cities or places so with end up spending all our vacation time in Florence. It wasn't easy to travel with 2 young kids, but now that they are getting older is getting much easier. I think that it is very important for them to travel, to experience different cultures, to hear different languages, and obviously to understand from where we are coming from.
Last year we were able to plan, and to execute a very nice vacation. My wife and my kids left a couple of week that the school was over, and they went first to London. They spent few days there, where we have few friends, and then they flew into Florence. I stayed in NJ for another couple of weeks and them I met them in Florence.
My part of the trip was an adventure, my flight from Newark was canceled, I had to take another flight from JFK, and when I got in London my connecting flight was already gone. I had to sleep in the airport, for the second night, and the following day I had to take a flight to Venice. Since all the flight to Florence were booked. When I landed in Venice, I took a fast train to Florence. These new trains are really cool. I really love them. These new generation of Italian trains are able to reach almost 200 miles per hours. For certain aspects I was excited by the possibility of being able to ride on those train. Anyway I got to Florence in the afternoon, since we had reserved a guided visit to Palazzo Vecchio I dropped my luggage to the deposito bagagli and walk to Piazza Signoria.
The Comune di Firenze, the Florentine municipality, organizes some really cool guided tours of the City Hall building. Il Palazzo Vecchio is a palace that was build in the 12 century, and was later modified in the 16 century. Some of the parts of the building are now a museum, and can't be visited without a ticket. We were able to book from the US a guided tour of the secret passages of Palazzo Vecchio. These type of tours are given by people that are impersonating important Florentine or like in our case, artists that worked in Florence in the Renaissances. Our guide was Giorgio Vasari, which among the various things he was the architect responsible for the enlargement of the building. The guide was dressed with the costumes of the 16 Century and took showed us a lot of cool stuff. If you are in Florence with kids this is really an activity that I recommend you. He took us trough secret passages, and he showed us some of the rooms that were used by the Medici. Since I was talking to him most of the time, and I really love this, he got very excited and he showed us rooms that are usually not open to visitor. Among the various room he showed us the room of the maps. The room of the maps is one of my favorite room of Palazzo Vecchio, I had been there several time. This room has numerous wooden panels, and on each panel is painted a part of the world. This room was completed around the 17 Century, and some of the maps are really accurate. The visit was really cool, and the kids really enjoyed.